On June 6, 2017, NSS Labs published its annual 2017 Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) Test Report and Security Value MapTM (SVM). For the first time in five years, NSS Labs did not place SonicWall in its “Recommended” quadrant of the SVM. In response, SonicWall immediately resolved the identified issues, automatically updated our firewalls worldwide, and was then publicly retested by NSS Labs to place in its upper right quadrant.

The earliest schemes of cryptography, such as substituting one symbol or character for another or changing the order of characters instead of changing the characters themselves, began thousands of years ago. Since then, various encoding and decoding systems were developed, based on more complex versions of these techniques, for the fundamental purpose of securing messages sent and received in written or electronic forms for all sorts of real world applications.

The SonicWall team is excited to be a gold level sponsor at Black Hat USA, one of the world’s leading IT security events, which opens at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas on July 22. Our booth number is 554 and we look forward to meeting you there. SonicWall will offer attendees information on the company’s suite of automated, real-time breach detection and prevention products and services, including the SonicWall Capture ATP cloud-based network sandbox which detects and stops ransomware, advanced persistent threats (APTs) and zero-day attacks.

On May 25th 2018, the European Union (EU) will introduce its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR is a set of regulations meant to protect personal data of EU residents, and enforces data privacy rules on how organizations collect, store and use the information. Failure to comply with the EU GDPR regulation carries heavy penalties including fines of up to €20 Million or 4 percent of global turnover.

If anyone ever needs proof on how effective SonicWall Capture Labs is, look back to the WannaCry ransomware attack in May 2017, and just last week the NotPetya malware. In contrast to over 250,000 endpoints compromised in over 150 countries, SonicWall customers with active security subscriptions were largely unaffected.

Why were they unaffected?

When the latest massive global cyber attack first hit on June 27, the security community observed that the payload behavior closely matched Petya ransomware, which emerged back in 2016, so we initially called this a variant. However, SonicWall Capture Labs researchers confirmed that this is definitely not Petya ransomware.

As I type this, news reports continue to roll in about yet the latest massive global ransomware attack. This time, the payload appears to be a ransomware called Petya. SonicWall Capture Labs identified the original Petya variants in 2016. However, this time it appears to be delivered by Eternal Blue, one of the exploits that was leaked from the NSA back in April.

Every day our children, teachers and administrators log into the network at school. How can you ensure the data travelling across that network is secure from hidden threats and attacks such as ransomware? With SonicWall next-gen firewalls and DPI SSL inspection technology, IT administrators can find threats hidden in encrypted web traffic that cybercriminals don’t want you to discover across your K-12 network.

Note: This is guest blog post by Bryan Chester, Vice President of North America Partner Software and Imaging Sales at Dell.

Email has long been acknowledged as a business critical application. However, it can expose your organization to devastating sabotage by offering hackers an easily accessible vehicle to exploit vulnerabilities in your organization’s network security.

Will you be ransomware’s next victim? Can ransomware encrypt your data and hold it hostage until you pay a ransom?

Organizations large and small across industries and around the globe are at risk of a ransomware attack. The media mostly reports attacks at large institutions, such as the Hollywood Hospital that suffered over a week offline in 2016 after a ransomware attack encrypted files and demanded ransom to decrypt the data.